Pressure Valve

Wednesday, December 08, 2004

A new story broke today. (Salon -- worth watching the ad to read the article.) You'll want to sit down for this one.

1. Greg Ford, a National Guardsman guarding prisoners in Samarra, became outraged at the acts of torture being used on prisoners.

2. He reported this torture to his commanding officer, who refused to accept the report.

3. The next day, he was strapped to a gurney and flown to Germany for "psychiatric treatment" for "combat stress," because his allegations were so obviously delusional.

4. After a passel of Army shrinks said he was perfectly fine--and that this was not the first time this had happened--and after an army of Army paper-pushers got upset that the Army had not documented its "medevac" of Ford, Ford was given an honorable discharge and implicitly ordered to drop off the face of the earth.

I don't want to overreact here, but it's hard to think of what would constitute an overreaction to this outrageous story. "Psychiatric treatment" for dissidents is Soviet stuff, the stuff that Reaganites used to tell by way of contrasting American purity.